Three Answers: Hodding Carter
By Dick Donahue -- Publishers Weekly, 6/30/2008 8:01:00 AM
Three Answers from Hodding Carter, whose Off the Deep End: The Probably Insane Idea That I Could Swim My Way Through a Midlife Crisis—and Qualify for the Olympics was published earlier this month by Algonquin Books.
PW: What made you think you think you could qualify for the Olympics at age 45?
HC: I just got back from the pros and for a short time I just forgot how old I was and felt great. I’ve been swimming since I was 11 months old and I ‘ve been a competitive racer since I was five. And besides the swimming the one thing I always knew was that I was going to make it to the Olympics. When Mark Spitz won the gold that was who I was going to be one day. And the thought just came to me; why not go for it now? You’re still good in the water; you’re swimming like you swam when you were out-of-shape at 20, so there’s no reason why you can’t go back to it. As insane as it sounds there was something valid in it. So it’s to prove a point, it’s to realize a lifelong dream, it’s to be immersed in the activity that gives me so much joy.
PW: Do you see this as some sort of a trend—middle-aged people becoming more involved in exercising and sports?
HC: I want to make it a trend. Middle-aged people are doing this already; they all go out and race against each other and people say, Oh, isn’t that nice—the 40- and 50-year-olds are racing against each other. The thing is it doesn’t have to be just that, and there are already swimmers and runners out there who are excelling and who over 40. I think athletics is going to be a whole lot more inclusive than it is now, because the scientific studies over the past decade showing that the old rule that said that for every year after 20 you lose 1% of muscle mass has been totally disproven. With the advent of these new studies a lot more people have gotten back into racing thinking, I can beat my younger self and I can beat these younger people, so I’m just going to keep growing. They’re saying, I’m 45 but I’m still a physical being. I can accept my age but I’m not going to be the way I was told I had to be.
PW: What would you like readers to take away from this book?
HC: You have a crazy idea, a crazy dream, and you don’t go after it. So as corny as it sounds, what I want people to see is that it’s probably not as crazy as you think it is. Because everyone, when I first said I was going to try to make it to the Olympic trials, they all laughed at me. And I laughed with them, because I thought yeah, this is pretty funny. And now I’m right on the cusp of doing it; I haven’t done it yet, but I’ve met tons of people who are my age or older who can do it, who will be doing it, and I wouldn’t have learned that if I hadn’t gone ahead and tried. We sort of give up on trying things that are beyond us as we get older. So my hope is that people will read this and laugh along with me but also get the idea that it’s really worth going for.
